Psychoanalysis has not had a comfortable history in relation to "race"
and racism, despite its origins in the Jewish lives of Freud and its
other first-generation progenitors and the insistent pressure of
antisemitism upon it. Indeed, the failure to fully address racism is a
running sore in the psychoanalytic movement. This has begun to be
remedied in recent years, but it is still the case that psychoanalysis
struggles to incorporate antiracist perspectives and that this might be
a reason why it has engaged relatively poorly with Black communities.
Psychoanalysis may have been a "Jewish science" in a positive sense, but
it has not fully leveraged this to become a truly antiracist one.
In Antisemitism and Racism, Stephen Frosh, a leading figure in
psychoanalytic studies, provides a psychoanalytically-informed
examination of the relations between antisemitism and antiblack racism.
Frosh's starting point is a claim that the Jewish origins and
implications of psychoanalysis fuel its capacity to interrogate racism
of all kinds. Indeed, the shared experience of exposure to different
kinds of racism raises prospects for renewed alliances between Jewish
and Black communities. Antisemitism and Racism ends with a chapter
that asks psychoanalysis itself to respond to some of the challenges
emerging from the Black Lives Matter and decolonial movements.
At a time when division and prejudice are on the rise to an alarming
degree, it is imperative that we examine, understand, and discuss the
psychological roots of racism.
